I’m not looking forward to the rainy season here in Eugene.

Oscar is a dirty dachshund

Apparently, this presentation was the winner of Slideshare.com’s “World’s Greatest Presentation” contest. Entitled Thirst, I found this presentation very eye opening and inspiring.

It’s amazing how many people work very hard to reduce their carbon footprint but don’t even realize how much their water consumption has an impact on the planet. Also, it is shocking to me from the standpoint that we, here in the states, take for granted the fact that we can walk over to the faucet and get a drink of water whenever we want.

Friends have told me stories of people they know joining the Peace Corps and coming back being super frugal about using water. For me, just learning/being reminded of the few facts in this presentation has affected how I think about my own water consumption.

Notable facts from the presentation:

• Less than .007% of the Earth’s water is consumable by humans
• A 10-minute shower uses 50 gallons of water
• 1 in 5 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water

Those of you closest to me know that I have a weird obsession with the concept of the Baconator. Although I’ve never eaten one of these ghastly burgers, the fact that Wendy’s is successfully marketing and promoting an 830 calorie hamburger is beyond me. It seems like the type of thing that Morgan Spurlock would pull out his camcorder to document (in fact he probably has and I just don’t know about it.)

Anyways, while listening to some nice music on Pandora.com, my browser was overtaken with the prospect of branding my music listening experience with fat filled smokey burger deliciousness….

It seems as though Pandora has jumped in the marketing sack with Wendy to get their money-making on. Hopefully, tomorrow they’ll want me to theme my music player with some Jenny Craig goodness to work off the 51g of fat from that oh-so delicious burger.

mmmmmmmmmm. Bacon.

I really like this picture that I took last time we visited Florence. Too bad the camera that I took it with is now worth more as a paper weight than it is as a camera…

I initially tried to post this using Flickr’s “blog this” functionality but found it quite limiting in that it doesn’t let you choose positioning or image size.

This past Wednesday was my birthday. I came home from jammin’ out with the band to find this awesome cake that Becca had made for me. Not only did she bake this crazy awesome homemade cake filled with delicious pudding and butter cream frosting, but she also frosted a Greek key on the side to accentuate the masculinity of the cake!

When we bought our house back in March, we decided that the one lesser attractive part of the home was the manner in which the backyard presented itself. When the house was built, they had simply poured a slab of concrete outside the back sliding door and that was that.

Well, we decided that we’d like to have something a little more inviting going on out there, so Becca’s dad and I took it upon ourselves to build a deck one weekend.

I wasn’t really sure what the plan would be to build it, but with her dad being experienced in this sort of thing I figured he would have some excellent suggestions. The existing concrete slab provided a good starting point as it left us in the position where we didn’t have to worry about digging post holes or any of that nonsense.

After 12 hours of work on a beautiful sunny day, we finally had the deck completed. Here’s the before and after pictures.

A lot has happened since June 11, 2007. I’ve been super busy with the usual attempts to balance work and home life. However, there’s been some super exciting things going on that I’ve failed to blog about!

Since I’ve been really bad about updating my blog in the last year (and I promise the drought is ending), I feel that it is much needed to update everybody on what I’ve been up to. Consider this my excuse list for why I’ve been such a bad blogger. Here’s a brief list of all the great things that have happened in my life since this time last year.

Read on to see the list! (more…)

I went on my first fishing trip in about 3 years (I’m ashamed to say) yesterday with a few friends.  We headed over to the Breitenbush River, just to the NE of Detroit Lake here in Oregon.  The river bank was awesome, with pretty fast paced water shooting over rock formations.  However, we didn’t see a trout all day…

I’ve posted my photos from this trip on flickr, view them here!

Here in Eugene, it seems to rain a lot. And by a lot, I mean every other day (lately). So, I decided to wear my rain coat to work. When I got inside I was greeted by a new variety of coat rack, complete with a sign that read “Long Coats Only”. Then I hopped over to my email. To the entire company, from Thomas Buscaglia — it read…

This is just a friendly reminder of our coat rack policy. I hate to have to do this, but there seem to be a few people among us who seem to be forgetting that these rules are in place for a reason. I won’t name any names, but you know who you are. Let’s try to remember: short coats go on short racks, long coats go on long racks. That’s all. If we all do our part we can keep this a pleasant work environment for everyone, tall and short.

Thank you.

Here is a picture of Ben Garney (one of the taller individuals here in the office at 6′7″) after he hung up his coat on the “World’s Tallest Coat Rack”.

Turns out that my coat is touching the floor because I am not privileged enough to use the “Long Coats Only” coat rack

She said yes! =)